Fish mislabeled

When customers buy fish for the grill or celebrate the unofficial start of summer with sushi, many of them won’t get what they think they’re purchasing if “seafood fraud” is as rampant as a recent study suggests.

More than half of the fish tested in Southern California by Oceana — a large international ocean advocacy group — were mislabeled, including virtually all of the sushi and “red snapper.”

Most consumers likely will never know or care about mistakes or dishonest tactics in the fish business. But for some, inaccurate labels create health concerns and limit their ability to select seafood based on where it was caught, a tenet of the “eat local” movement. Mislabeled seafood also can undermine restoration efforts when vulnerable species replace healthy stocks, and cheat consumers by setting premium prices for lower-quality products.

Proposed state legislation seeks to improve consumer access to information by increasing labeling requirements for large restaurant chains to include more information about food harvested from the ocean. And agencies in Los Angeles County are stepping up investigations of mislabeling in the wake of the Oceana assessment.

“Consumers are being asked to guess what they are eating,” said Kimberly Warner, senior scientist at Oceana. “The public should be provided with more information about the food they are purchasing.”

Matt Sutton at the California Restaurant Association is not convinced the Oceana study represents the statewide situation and he’s not sure how restaurants could comply with proposed state labeling laws given that their products and suppliers can change daily.

Sutton said such rules are premature and possibly misdirected, pending the outcome of an investigation of seafood delivery networks by the Centers for Disease Control. “The supply chain is complicated and long,” he said. “So the presumption that mislabeling is happening at the restaurant end of things is completely unfair.”

The average American ate 15.8 pounds of fish and shellfish in 2010, a slight decline from 2009. Overall, Americans consumed about 4.9 billion pounds of seafood. While seafood consumption has remained relatively consistent in recent years, the amount of imported seafood continued to increase. About 86 percent of the fish and shellfish eaten in the U.S. is from abroad, up by 4 percent from 2009 to 2010.

Proponents of greater transparency in the seafood business said some 1,700 species from across the world’s oceans are available in U.S. markets and just a fraction of it is inspected, creating numerous opportunities for fish to bypass regulators.

Steven Wilson, chief quality officer for NOAA’s seafood inspection program, cited a federal analysis a few years ago that showed about 40 percent of the products assessed were mislabeled. By far the biggest problem he sees is packages containing less product than the stated weight — not one kind of fish swapped out for another.

But at NOAA’s regional headquarters in Long Beach, the acting special agent in charge of enforcement said mislabeling types of seafood is a “prevalent problem.” Martina Sagapolu said her agents use DNA testing to determine whether fish imported by land from Mexico is properly labeled. At least one San Diego County case is under investigation — Sagapolu wouldn’t provide details — and NOAA is working with Los Angeles County officials to assess problems highlighted by Oceana.